Sitting down at the base of one of the statues on the bridge, they continued talking. Still melancholy, Iolanta told him she did not share his enthusiasm about life. In her view, life was only a temporary stage, and a “big black hole” awaited everybody. She said that six years before, at age nineteen, she had received a diagnosis of acute tuberculosis. The disease made her indifferent to everything in life. She cited the engraving on King Solomon’s ring—“This too shall pass.”8
Her words relieved Dmitri. As he had hoped, it was illness, not depravity, that made her sad and pessimistic. He would nurse her back to health, and eventually she would cheer up. Meanwhile, Iolanta professed her love for heroic outcasts—“prophets beaten up by stones, Prometheuses, and Quasimodos.” Only selfless heroes were high on her list. “I shy away from people with double chins, a hero’s certificate, and a check for their heroic deeds neatly folded in their pockets,” she declared.
Dmitri spoke in equally grand and abstract terms. He rhapsodized about a life full of big ideas, about the beauty of struggle, victory or death. He prattled on about everything that was on his mind at the time. His own talk intoxicated him and made him oblivious to the passing time. Writing about that episode four decades later, he finds his own image of a man pontificating about politics on a first date rather humorous: “I provided a firm base of scientific Socialism to human dreams, quoted the classics of Marxism and Leninism, refuted bourgeois criticism and its reformist distortions, tied the general theoretical premises to the revolutionary practice of the moment, and finally, enthusiastically concluded [my speech] with slogans developed for the May Day celebrations.”
It’s no wonder that Iolanta fell asleep listening to him. Carried away with his talk, he noticed she was asleep only when she cuddled under his arm. As he wrapped his coat around her, he thought of her as a trusting child. But a few hours later, when the skies lightened up and Iolanta awakened in his arms, he was disillusioned again. The first thing she asked when she opened her eyes made his heart sink: why hadn’t he taken advantage of her when she was sleeping? She laughed at his gentlemanly behavior. “Oh, it’s all too clear to me,” she said. “You’re impotent. Yes, sir, you’re impotent. You should see a doctor right away.”
Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, she pulled down the top of her dress and bared her breasts, saying in a cute voice, “And you, poor little ones, are you alive or has this idiot frozen you to death?” Dmitri was taken aback. “A whore,” he said to himself. But then, as he walked her home, he changed his mind. He decided that she was too sad for a vulgar vamp. As they passed a hot dog stand, Iolanta said she was starving. She ate hot dogs and gulped milk from a bottle, like a puppy, and once again, for him she was just a child he had to protect.
They parted at the doorway of her building. At the last moment, she gave him one of her brooches, a silver one shaped like a rose. As he stepped onto the roadway, a passing truck nearly killed him. Luckily, a passerby pulled him back to safety. The brooch wound up in the mud. Four decades later, recalling that moment, he exclaims, “ ‘What a menacing omen!’ I should have shouted then. But, in his wandering, a human being is incapable of unraveling the mysterious signs of his fate. A dark shadow of my future crossed my path, but I stepped over it, not understanding anything.”
The next day, he ran into Iolanta again on the steps of Villa Teresa. She asked him to take her to a theater that evening. Excited, he immediately offered to meet her an hour earlier for dinner before the show. The moment she agreed, he suggested meeting even earlier to make time to visit the Mission and register their marriage there. “Why did I say it? I don’t know,” he recalls. “But, in the dark depth of my ego, a clairvoyant gaze found the truth. Suddenly, I felt at ease and calm.” Iolanta agreed. Later that day, the Mission’s Council, Comrade Kliavin, recorded their marriage. At the moment when Dmitri excitedly signed his name, he produced a big ink blot and exclaimed, “What the hell!” In much dismay, his new bride told him she had mentally decided that the first word he uttered after signing their marriage papers would become symbolic of their future life together.
Disaster struck instantly, the moment he and Iolanta signed the marriage papers. He was still trembling with the excitement of this pivotal event in his life, when, to calm him down, Iolanta suggested that they have a smoke together. She opened her gold-plated cigarette case. It looked familiar to him. He caught a glimpse of the engraving inside the front cover—Am loving you only and all my other loves are but nothing—and he froze in horror. “If you ever come across another who owns such a cigarette case,” Isolde’s words flashed in his mind, “look at that person, and you’ll know that I’m in front of you, in the body of that other person. We are inseparable.”
In dismay, barely talking to his new wife, he took her home. She invited him up, but he abruptly said good-bye and left. In his memoirs, Dmitri gives two conflicting accounts of what happened next. In the first account, as soon as he reached the Charles Bridge a few blocks away, he changed his mind and returned to Iolanta. He found her crying, consoled her, and spent the rest of the night with her. But elsewhere in his memoirs, he gives a different—psychologically much more convincing—account of the events of his wedding night: while he did return to his new bride, it wasn’t right away but several hours later. He spent these hours in the company of another woman, the French Embassy typist, Marie-Eliane Aucouturier.9
(Nine years down the road, when Dmitri revealed this fact to Iolanta, he sugarcoated his infidelity by presenting it as an example of his personal sacrifice to the higher cause. But it was true only to a point. He had pursued the French Embassy worker for nearly six months under orders, and meeting Iolanta had mixed up his plans and delayed that important step in Marie-Eliane ’s recruitment. Still, it’s hard to believe that he had no choice but to seal his and Marie-Eliane’s friendship with intimacy on his own wedding night. It is not too difficult to surmise what happened that night. Shocked and traumatized by the sudden discovery of his newlywed wife’s past, he did something to assuage the blow to his male ego, to mend his broken heart. So he turned to another young woman who was ready to embrace him. A psychological nuance makes the last scenario ring true: after he disclosed his long affair with the Frenchwoman to his wife, Iolanta immediately responded that she knew when he had slept with Marie-Eliane for the first time, that it was on their wedding night. It is no wonder that she remembered her new husband’s bizarre behavior.)
If the whole story in Dmitri’s memoirs about the cigarette case sounds too contrived, as if taken from a B movie, the reader should bear in mind Nabokov’s notion about life imitating art, even if, in this instance, it’s low-grade art. At the same time, it is also possible that Dmitri invented the cigarette case connection between Isolde and Iolanta to conceal the fact that he had known (or perceived) all along that these two young women were lovers. It could have happened that at some point during his relentless pursuit of Isolde he had seen the women together (after all, Prague was not such a huge metropolitan city at that time). In that respect, his rush to marry Iolanta could easily be explained in psychoanalytical terms. After failing to erotically conquer Isolde and thus assuage the pain felt in his “old” (childhood) brain, when he met Iolanta, he unconsciously began to pursue her as a means to achieve visceral gratification: if he could not have Isolde, Iolanta would do. Moreover, he married her hastily because of his need to secure that psychologically important conquest. (As will be seen in the way their relationship developed in the coming years, the ease with which he separated from her on many occasions, at one point even nonchalantly handing her over to another man, makes this scenario of the outset of his marriage plausible.)10
Whatever scenario joined him with Iolanta, upon his discovery of the inscribed cigarette case, which jolted him back to the reality that Iolanta was not, after all, Isolde, it took Dmitri several days after their wedding night before he was able to compose himself enough to confront his newlywed wife. Until the last moment, he hoped
he had misread the engraving, that Isolde was no more than his wife’s close friend. When he finally brought himself to ask her, Iolanta responded evasively. She began talking about love in vague and general terms, claiming that this emotion defies clear-cut definitions. No two loves are alike, and her love for him was unique. As a way to calm him down, she offered to view Isolde as a test of strength of their marital love. And, in return, she promised to treat any young woman who might appear in his life in the future the same way. She insisted that true love cannot be possessive; it is a contradiction in terms. She also swore she would step aside if that theoretical other woman ever made him happier than she, Iolanta, was able to do, adding that she expected the same selflessness from him.
Elusive as her response was, after much hesitation, Dmitri accepted it. Deep down he hoped that his strong will would keep in check his physically and emotionally fragile wife, whom he saw more as a child—charming, but sick and unhappy—than a mature woman.
Describing his life in that period, Dmitri tries to project his image as a confident man in full control of his fate. In reality, nothing was further from the truth. From the moment of recruitment, a Soviet intelligence worker relinquished control of his life to his spymaster and, through him, to the Soviet state. Dmitri no longer fully belonged to himself and would not be able to regain his freedom for most of the rest of his life. As an intelligence operative, he not only had to report each and every social interaction but also had no choice of place of work or residence, not to mention having no control over such important decisions as marriage, which in some instances was even arranged as a means of a cover.
Writing in the 1960s and wary of censors, Dmitri glosses over the fact that even his marriage, the pivotal event in his life, had to meet his spymaster’s approval. Intelligence operatives’ marriages usually posed no problem. A family made agents even more dependent on their controller: now they had more to lose in case of defection or doubledealing. It also made them less susceptible to counterintelligence ploys involving sexual bait, which first compromised them and then coerced them into changing sides. But a potential bride’s background had to be thoroughly checked to ensure that she did not present a security risk. Iolanta was cleared quickly, which is why Dmitri was able to marry her the next day. Not only did his bride work for the Mission on a voluntary basis, but her father, Josef Shelmat, was a staff member on the Central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.11
In his memoirs, Dmitri passes over in silence how he managed to reconcile his marriage with his assignment to recruit the French Embassy secretary, Miss Aucouturier. After all, according to the “Golst” scenario, he had to seduce her by convincing her that he had serious intentions toward her. His marriage to Iolanta could jeopardize his assignment. To prevent derailment of the important task of obtaining French diplomatic codes and ciphers, and unable to talk the enthralled bridegroom out of marriage, “Golst” had to step in and take precautionary measures. While Dmitri’s Soviet citizenship made the marriage fully legitimate, registering it at the Mission instead of the Prague City Hall made it low profile. Most likely, Comrade Kliavin, head of the Mission’s chancellery, who conducted the quick ceremony, was ordered to keep it secret. After all, some Mission employees, Roman Jakobson in particular, belonged to the same social circles in which Dmitri’s courtship of the Frenchwoman was undoubtedly known.
All this makes Dmitri’s assertion that after their marriage he and his new wife led an intense social life—attending all sorts of parties and nightclubs—seem rather dubious. After all, appearing in public with another woman, never mind his wife, would have undermined his efforts to recruit Marie-Eliane, a woman of strict moral standards. That could explain why, in contrast to a general statement about his extensive mingling in Prague society with Iolanta, Dmitri goes into a detailed and lengthy description of what seem to be the true events: in secret from his friends and colleagues, and provided he had a cache of plausible excuses for not seeing his French “fiancée,” he often escaped with Iolanta to the countryside, to secluded areas in the surrounding mountains and forests.
Tenuous as his hope of keeping Iolanta under his control was, Dmitri’s gamble seemed to work during the first year of married life. Gradually, he and Iolanta grew closer. Decades later, he recalled that period of his life as truly happy.
But one day a new disaster struck. Iolanta returned to that sad state of mind he had noticed when they met. Her eyes sorrowful, her gaze empty, she withdrew from the world around her. Her condition worsened day by day. Finally, she refused not only to talk to anyone but even to eat. Alarmed, Dmitri summoned a physician. The doctor examined Iolanta, found nothing wrong with her physical health, and recommended a consultation with a psychiatrist. Writing about this many years later, Dmitri describes the psychiatrist’s visit in inordinately minute detail, as if he wanted to persuade himself that the decision he had made during that visit was the right one.
Unsuccessful in his attempts to establish eye contact with the patient, the doctor asked Dmitri about his wife’s family history. Dmitri told him what he knew. Iolanta came from a troubled family. Both her parents suffered from tuberculosis; in fact, her mother had died of a pulmonary hemorrhage. She also had a nervous disposition and often flared up easily. Iolanta’s kindhearted and weak-willed father was prone to drinking. Her older brother was a gambler and a suicidal alcoholic. The other brother was also an alcoholic who refused to get an education. Iolanta’s younger sister, Bozhena, whom Dmitri had met at the All-Workers’ Ball shortly after he met Iolanta, took the radicalism of the Communist ideology, which the whole family embraced, to its extreme. Since the ideology called for contempt toward bourgeois respectability and propriety, Bozhena totally neglected her appearance; at the ball, she looked like a scarecrow indeed. As Iolanta put it, her sister combed her hair with “her fingers only” and wore “antediluvian black stockings recovered from the city dumpsters.” Her breasts were “pulled tight by bandages so that, God forbid, she wouldn’t appear either a bourgeois or a girl at all.”
Summing up his findings, the psychiatrist explained Iolanta’s withdrawal from the world as a psychotic episode characteristic of a borderline patient going through a depressive cycle. Based on what was known about borderline personality disorder at the time, he also guessed something about Iolanta that Dmitri had already known—that she was bisexual. The doctor warned Dmitri that his wife was dangerous, because there was an “eternally smoldering spark of madness” in her. “Your charming spouse is a Pandora’s box,” he said. “Never forget it and beware!” He recommended immediate hospitalization and told Dmitri that Iolanta’s condition was a solid basis for divorce.
There are no simple answers to the question of why Dmitri reveals these highly private matters of his domestic life, sparing no clinical detail. Did he just want to get off his chest something that had troubled him for so many years? And why did he remain married to a mentally ill woman who gave him grief from day one (it could even be said, minute one!) of their marriage?
While we may never know all the answers to these questions, a close reading of his memoirs sheds some light on them. It seems that Iolanta’s mental disorder served as an aphrodisiac to Dmitri. The psychiatrist read him the following passage from a textbook on patients with symptoms similar to his wife’s: “The very nature of mental disturbances of these patients makes them extraordinarily sensitive and highly vulnerable. From here come their natural gifts, pure-heartedness, and charm. As they shy away from everything earthly, weak and defenseless, they are capable of evoking the most passionate love in others without much effort on their part.” Dmitri commented, “Amazing! You just drew Iolanta’s portrait.”
Even motionless and withdrawn, Iolanta seemed to arouse him: “Deadly immobile, she looked at the sunset with her unseeing eyes,” he writes. “Something horrific was in her—and seductively exciting for me, as always. Her transparent nightie bared her, taunting me. While hiding the details of her body, her heavy velvet
robe revealed the perfection of her general outlines. She was a wonderful vessel from which, with my thirsty lips, I drank the sweet poison of enjoyment.”12
Apparently, Iolanta’s melancholic beauty fit Dmitri’s aesthetic ideal of femininity, shaped by his early readings of fin de siècle French and Russian poetry. In fact, Dmitri precedes the account of his romance with Iolanta with the lines from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Madrigal triste” (“Sad Madrigal”): “Que m’emporte que tu sois sage? Sois belle, sois triste.” (What do I care whether you’re sane or not? Be beautiful, be sad.)
Dmitri’s addiction to the “sweetness of danger” was a strong motivation in his daring intelligence operations, especially in the years to come, which affected his choices in his personal life as well. Perhaps in answer to himself about why he had stayed with the mentally troubled Iolanta, he quotes another decadent poet, this time a Russian, Aleksandr Blok:
It’s frightful, it’s sweet, it’s inevitable, it’s a must
For me—to throw myself into the mighty and foamy billows
And for you—as a green-eyed naiad,
To sing and splash near the treacherous rocks.13
Without much hesitation, Dmitri decided against divorcing Iolanta and took her to a hospital. However, to his chagrin, their relationship failed to improve after her discharge. Moreover, his wife mysteriously disappeared on a regular basis. Despondent, Dmitri confided his domestic troubles to his close friend (and fellow OGPU agent) Georgy Georgiev. He learned something from his friend that he wished was not true: his wife and Isolde had resumed their relationship some time ago. They were meeting at the apartment of Georgiev’s employer, Mr. Goldberg, whose young wife, Lea, herself a bisexual, had turned her quarters into a meeting place for her lesbian girlfriends.
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